Irritated& Shamed Indian

A question raised on Quora



What are the most irritating and shameful things in India?

I stand shamed when I'm reminded that the inclusive, open hearted philosophy of hinduism is institutionalized into the exclusionary rule ridden Religion of Hinduism replete with uniforms and hierarchies. That just ain't right.
I hang my head when a culture and philosophy that spawned Gandhi finds it so easy to justify killing in the name of Religion.
My skin crawls when a culture that Officially venerates Woman, finds it difficult to codify and control institutionalized violence against women. Do the khap panchayat rulings ring a bell? So very Talibanesque of them, no? But, please, don't tell 'em I said that. (see #2) And yes, Khap Panchayats are as much a religion, rituals, rules, repression, and all, as any of the other Official ones.
Shamed, I am, when jingoism and its fellow traveler racism is being woven into the fabric of the nation; when the Other is demonized and when politically necessary, reviled.
I cringe when I see unimaginable amounts of money are spent on monuments and temples to Mammon, while children go unfed, unclothed, uneducated, uncared for.
I get most irritated that India, YoMo'In (young modern India), aam admi, good (for a given value) people, accept this as the way things, in all their lal-bathied, self promoting VVIP (uppercase by decree)ways are. I shouldn't have said most, 'cuz, I get even more irritated that you, YoMo'In, with your abysmal voting percentages, allow this to happen.
Oh, and the incessant honking is maddening.

Free Thinking

So, here’s me, a member in moderator-approved standing, of an internet association of free thinkers, yclept Bengaluru FreeThinkers, thinking, in a reasonably orderly fashion, about that name. And that’s when I start to get confused.

I should probably explain.

See, the word free, and its various avatars, has for me anyway, implications of anarchic, chaotic carelessness; the antithesis of rationality which, much like this sentence, requires a degree of control and containment.

Now, the Bengaluru FreeThinkers, (BFTs), as educated, sophisticated, and articulate, as rational a group as one could hope for, has, quite rightly, taken up the matter of the spate of ideologically motivated crimes and misdemeanors targeting comment and critique of cultural sentiments in India. Any attempts to stifle contrary opinions are given a respectful hearing and refutation, if called for, is stated in measured, quite often grammatically comprehensible terms; all in all, a rational group. I am but a foot soldier in that army. However, and in the time, and battle, honored tradition of the soldier, the grunt, I have a cavil. No, it’s actually more of a bitch, bordering on a moan.

And it is this.

The folks using sharp objects and projectile weapons to object to the opinions of other folks, are doing so because their sentiments, and I’m quoting here, have been hurt. Put another way they are reacting to an external stimulus with snake-brain logic, choosing fight rather than flight to a perceived threat. The actions and methodologies of that reaction are not, or at least seem not be, susceptible to any sort of higher order thinking. Higher order thinking, the kind that imposes reason and regulation on the process, would show that the control of sentiment and its sensitivities is necessary in any social structure with pretensions of equity and fairness in its governance. In short, the snake brain is being given the freedom of its simplistic, no grey scale differentiations, choices. Thinking, such as it might be, is predicated on that heady, adrenaline pumping impulse to fight. Free at last, great god a’mighty, free at last. Bunches and bunches of free thinking happening. Rationality and its needs are given short shrift. Blood is spilled. Free thinking.

See where I’m going with this?

Expatriation

“Back home.” Russell said, referencing some stark contrast with the way things are here, in Bengaluru, and the way they are, uh, back home. Blues Bobby and I nodded in agreement.

We are ex-pats, the three of us, voluntarily – for a given value of voluntary – expatriated from lives of rigorous middle class existences in the land that set the standard for rigorous middle class existences, USA, the putative home.

Between us we have a cumulative 42 plus years’ worth of expatriation, which makes the word home problematic.

I have been in B’luru for getting on to fifteen years.

Blues Bobby has spent the past twenty years in, … you know, he doesn’t really talk about specifics much but I get the impression that it was somewhere along the Adriatic coast. [He keeps looking over his shoulder as he mutters and slurs his way through the non-specifics. I’ve learned that it is best not to get too curious.] Blues Bobby is currently domiciled in B'luru and is showing unmistakable symptoms, and, he has found a blues band that, from time to time, invites him to sing lead.  Anyway, in that span of time, neither of us has been ‘back home’ for longer than the three weeks it took to deal with visa issues; Blues Bobby twice, and I, once. Russell, in his decade here, returns once a year with armloads of grandchildren gifts, all glitter and ethnic chic, but, about 5 to 6 weeks into the mid-western summer he starts missing his lungi and its commando option. Me? I’ve been here since the turn of the century. Though India born, I was whisked off to the US in late childhood and my body and my soul show the unmistakable signs of having come of age in the ‘60s, with all the implications of that smoke wreathed transformative time.

Which begs the question, actually, begs a lot of questions, but right up there on the list is, why? Why would 3 men in the, let’s call it, early to mid-evening of their lives, choose to turn their inevitably waning energies away from all that is familiar to establish, re-establish, their edge-of-curmudgeonly routines into the mad energy that is Bangalore today? And having done so, why would they still refer to the US as home when it is patently not so?

The answer, I think, lies in the aforementioned ‘60s. That was when the three of us began to think of home as the place where nothing happened. The place where same old, same old was actively sought; the starting point, the stultifying boredom of which started each of us on our peripatetic journey into adulthood, the larger world, and its promise of a new tomorrow, peace, love, rock ‘n’ roll, and creativity released from the bonds of tradition.

Relased creativity pretty well describes Modern India (Mo’In) (right?) in general and B’luru in particular. Strangers living next door to strangers makes for really interesting cooking. India feels like the San Francisco Sixties all up in here. There is a psychedelic tinge to the happenings of the street. Reality is being re-defined and anyone over thirty is being ignored, politely, but quite firmly. I can tell. Blues Bobby is getting more gigs.

Peace.

There is the ignoble part of me that envies the youth in India. More particularly the youth in Bengalooru. They are living in a world that I thought Iwould never see again and they are living it brimming with the youthful energies that I once had. In the words of the song, it smells like teen spirit all up in here.
A heady scent, that. It is one that I and my generation, encountered, experienced, infused into ourselves, better than half a century ago. And in so doing changed the course of human social history. I believe for the better. The Youth of B’loor (Yo...) – no wait, that’s an unfortunate acronym – Youth in B’loor (YiB), stand on the threshold of doing the same.
There is that dusky undertone of Travel, Adventure, New Experiences, and Unpredictable Delights that happen when strangers start living next door to each other. In B’loor that happens because of all the cities in India, B’loor ranks among the newer ones. India’s older cities, the large ancient ones, grew over the centuries. With their various sectarian and ethnic agglutinations domiciled in enclaves of sameness, those older cities perpetuated, and still do (to one degree or another), the mildly xenophobic attitudes of the rural and traditional backgrounds of the denizens. B’loor, on the other hand, exploded into city-dom. Young Information Technology worker bees swarmed B’loor from all parts of India, bringing with them bits and pieces of their ‘native’. Without Mom, Dad, and the parivar looking over their shoulders these youngsters, Youngistan, to give them their generational label started mingling. The huge advantage to mingling is that in its Brownian motion it knocks of those edges that don’t fit, leaving a well rounded organism that merges into the larger whole of Modern India, or MoIn, as I prefer. (Get it? I did, it is a close relative of a pun). Next thing you know, and to quote Bobby Darin, you’ve got 2 butterflies, casting their eyes, both in the same direction with the resulting butterfly collection. That’s what happens when you’ve got young singles living in close proximity to each other. In MoIn, in B’loor, it is getting increasingly difficult for the ‘native’ to be identified by physical feature. Ask the children of the YiBs for their ‘native’ and you’ll get as confusing an answer as you would from any USian of my generation.
“Let’s see now. We started out in Syracuse, and then moved to McHenry, but I went to school in Iowa, California, Montana, New York, spending considerable amount of time in Amsterdam and Haight Ashbury.”
Except, of course, the names will be Indian. The music, the laughter, the love, the heady scent of The Possible, will have a B’loor accent.
World peace may not be that far away.